Trolltech andSharp haveannounced
a really spiffy-looking
Linux palmtop, named "Zaurus".
The device itself features
a sliding (retractable) keyboard, a color
display, a CF expansion slot (for memory or peripherals), an
SD expansion slot (for secure memory storage or other peripherals),
an IR port, a USB connector and a headset port.
On the software side, the Zaurus usesLineo'sEmbedix Linux;
Trolltech's Qt/Embedded, Qt/Palmtop and Qt AWT GUI technologies;Insignia Solution'sJeode PDA Edition;
and Opera Software's embedded web browser.
Sharp is accepting pre-orders from the developer community for the
SL-5000D developer unit (registerhere).
With the continuing additions to kdenox, this might just be
a great platform for KOffice/embedded.

This thing looks very nice! But as always with small devices, one problem: there are not enough keys for the extra characters in the swedish (and I guess many others) alphabet. I will never buy a PDA with keyboard unless it has got a reasonable keyboard layout.

O.k. there's the Qt AWT, so you can do your programming in Java, but it has
native look n' feel of Qt.

The preinstalled apps (like the organizer or the mailer): Are they written in Qt/C++ which is all known to us ...or in Java? Will you be able to still use C++ for development _without_ major modifications to the PDA's OS and Desktop Environment settings?
Am I right, you can choose Konqui for browser (QT/C++)?

Or do you have to get along with Java?
Java seems to work out of the box,
QT/C++ needs what? (a crosscompiler?)

Qt embedded is already installed (the device was shown at "Systems" fair in Munich in October, with Qt). The web pages seems to be not up to date.
Sharp has recognized the power of QPE and switched over in the last weeks.
Developer releases should be available in November for around 399$, the target for the final devices is march (with a higher price?).
According to there homepage http://www.lisa.de/ is also involved in application development.

This is indeed a good platform for KOffice. I think that for using KOffice as main Word Processor on the desktop is lacks some major features. Star/Open Office does this job much better. Is there anybody working on a port of Koffice to qpe ?

Arrived about an hour ago, we are working on porting Kivio mp to it right now. It is a sweet unit, I hope they forget they sent it to me :). It's much nicer than the iPaq and smaller, it's just a touch larger than my Handspring Visor. There are some humorous misspellings in some of the current dialog boxes.

Wow, that's gotta be the best part of your job, getting to play with those gadgets! If it only included a cellphone, I'd have ordered mine by now...

But Shawn, to be honest, I think Kivio should be the very last thing to port to a handheld. I haven't done too much diagramming, but i found out that it takes quite a lot of screenspace to create bigger diagrams, since you tend to quickly lose overview.

As far as applications, out of all the things we have, Kivio seems the most appropriate, if not particularly appropriate. We're going to look at Aethera too when we finish the Qt port later this week, but I think it's too fat for this device.

The device is slightly longer than my Visor. Qpe feels like a cross between Palm OS and WinCE, I'm not totally sure I like it yet, I don't care for the handwriting recognition on it at all, but the keyboard is pretty nice. You're going to be using your thumbs to type basically, and there is a enough room on there so it's not a problem.

There is a version of Opera on there, but I can't think of anything more painful than surfing the net on a screen this size, but at least there is a keyboard, trying to type a URL takes about 5 to 10 minutes (seriously, I tried it on a larger test unit some months ago).

The display is very nice and all the applications I brought up were very zippy, I was pleased with the performance. So at this stage I would give it a positive review.

I wanna plug in a keyboard and monitor and use this like a computer ;-) OK really I just wanna be able to use it for doing presentations instead of lugging a laptop around and using windbloze and F!@#$%@#$%#$ING PowerPoint